


if you know where to look

by ghost_teeth



Category: Detroit: Become Human (Video Game)
Genre: Alternate Universe - Gender Changes, Detroit: Become Lesbians, F/F, Hand & Finger Kink, Ken Doll Android Anatomy | Androids Have No Genitalia (Detroit: Become Human), Porn with Feelings, Thirium Pump Play (Detroit: Become Human), chaotic butch hank, don’t call hank henrietta, lawful futch connie, not necessarily cis
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2018-11-25
Updated: 2018-11-25
Packaged: 2019-08-29 02:23:58
Rating: Mature
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 1
Words: 4,097
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/16735245
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/ghost_teeth/pseuds/ghost_teeth
Summary: The drive back to the station is quiet and the air is sharp with static. Connie looks at Hank’s hand on the steering wheel, considers the spaces between her thick fingers and what might fit there.





	if you know where to look

 The lieutenant is hunched over the toilet bowl, and Connie says _Henrietta_ for the first and only time.

Connie’s preconstruction program is left stuttering feebly at the speed with which she’s seized by the collar and bent backward over the vanity, head slamming back hard enough to thread the mirror with hairline cracks.

Lieutenant Anderson’s face is incongruously neutral, bracketed by a ragged curtain of iron-gray hair. “Listen, Barbie, not even my mother calls me that,” she says, soft and almost sweet. Connie’s crisp shirt collar is drawn tight around her throat and there’s a hand at her sternum, pressing her into the mirror. It is a large hand, blunt-fingered and wide-palmed. Connie could break this hold very easily.

“I’m sorry,” she says, and widens her eyes fractionally in a facsimile of contrition. “Would you prefer I continue to refer to you by your title?”

The lieutenant presses her against the mirror for a second more, close enough that Connie’s visual interface starts cheerfully rattling off the chemical composition, brand history, and batch serial number of the Black Lamb on the lieutenant’s breath. Finally, with one final savage shove, Lieutenant Anderson lets go and slumps back down to the floor, returning to the toilet.

“Hank,” she says into the bowl, voice echoing against the porcelain. “Just call me Hank, same as everyone else.” A shuddering heave seizes her broad shoulders for a moment, and when it passes she adds, “Also, my mother doesn’t call me _Henrietta_ because she’s been dead for fifteen years. Doesn’t call me much of anything, lately. Har-har.”

Connie, still bent at the waist over the sink, touches her own hand to her chest, just where the lieutenant’s— _Hank’s—_ hand was pressed seconds before. Connie’s hand is so much smaller. She straightens up and checks the knot of her tie in the mirror. “Hank,” she repeats. “I’ll remember that.”

“Wonderful. Top of the class.” Hank retches violently. “Give me five minutes, okay?” 

“Sure.” Connie thinks this is not the best idea. She considers asking Hank if she needs a glass of water, or someone to hold her hair back while she vomits, but she doesn’t need state-of-the-art preconstruction software to tell her how Hank will react to that. She withdraws to the living room.

 

* * *

 

Eliana Kamski smiles like a scalpel and asks, what could be worse than having to choose between two evils? Connie knows her answer, but she would prefer not to give it to this woman. There’s a dark joke in Kamski’s every word and Connie suspects it would be a bad idea to become the punchline.

“Let’s get outta here.”

Connie’s humming components are generating unsustainable levels of heat and the emergency coolant flooding her veins leaves her shuddering between two temperature extremes. Hank’s big hand is on her shoulder, spinning her toward the door. Connie carefully catalogues the exact width of every one of those fingertips, and it does nothing to quiet the mad vibrations of her carbon fiber endoskeleton.

(The drive back to the station is quiet and the air is sharp with static. Connie looks at Hank’s hand on the steering wheel, considers the spaces between her thick fingers and what might fit there.)

 

* * *

 

In a quiet moment, they meet in front of the Chicken Feed.

Connie shuts her eyes and presses her face into Hank’s coat. The temperature of the air outside is twenty-eight degrees Fahrenheit with a windchill of twenty, her sensors tell her. There’s no way to calculate the heat of the broad hand on the back of her neck, the entire weight of it. She pulls the fingerprints from her internal database and admires them against the dark behind her eyelids.

With her other hand, Hank gives Connie’s back a hearty thump and then releases her. “Alright, Barbie, that’s enough of that,” she says. She’s looking down at the steel toes of her own boots. “Let’s go somewhere warm. Pretty sure you could cut steel on my tits right now.”

She starts off toward her manually-driven antique clunker of a car, and Connie trots after her. “Yeah, you know, I’m pretty sure during that hug you impaled and irreparably damaged some of my vital components,” Connie chirps.

Hank snorts. “You know, I think I preferred you when you were all ‘yes, Lieutenant’ and ‘gee whiz, Lieutenant.’”

Connie winks at Hank over the roof of the car just before the lock disengages. “Yes, Lieutenant,” she says, and swings down into the passenger’s seat. A long strange minute passes before Hank joins her in the car.

 

* * *

 

The mirror in Hank’s bathroom is still spiderwebbed with cracks where Connie’s head impacted it. Connie hugs a folded towel to her chest and examines her reflection in splintered fragments. She brushes one fingertip along the thick dark fringe of her eyelashes and does not blink. She touches the freckles on her nose and pats the stiff wet-look sweep of her hair and thinks: _Woman._ Without even speaking it, she can feel the hot foreign weight of the word on her tongue.

She puts the towel neatly on the toilet lid and turns back to the mirror. She shrugs off her Cyberlife blazer, folds it and places it on the top of the towel, then, thinking better of it, brushes it off and lets it lay crumpled on the floor. It’s satisfying, seeing the abandoned heap of it. The button-down beneath is cool white and perfectly fitted to her body, buttoned to the top even with the tie gone. Connie doesn’t sweat and she knows the shirt smells of nothing. She touches the top button. Her fingers have gone stiff and uncooperative. She wants to unbutton it, _could_ unbutton it. Nothing is stopping her from unbuttoning it. Her eyes drift to the bathroom door. She wishes someone could do it for her.

A sharp angry noise escapes her, and she’s quite sure it was unintentional. She seizes both sides of her shirt collar and yanks. The shirt is no match for top-of-the-line synthetic musculature and space-age hydraulics, and buttons are sent ricocheting around the bathroom. Connie wrestles the shirt off completely and lets it drop. Then, before she can lose her nerve, she peels off her painted-on jeans and tosses them into a corner. 

She’s never seen this body, her body; she has never had any reason to examine it. The closest word she can find in her infinite database to describe it is _unfinished_.

She tries to think: _Woman,_ or even _Girl,_ but some circuit isn’t completing. Her right arm sports a cuff of luminescent blue, and she takes a moment to appreciate it. She finds the color pleasing, the break in her assembly line-blank flesh a visual relief. She palms the suggestions of breasts—soft insensate swells with no nipples, afterthoughts in her design. Between her legs, her searching fingers find, as expected, soft nothingness. There’s nothing to discover, but her processors still feel overburdened. She presses one palm to the center of herself, where her thirium pump hums hot and vital. Her hands are very small, and this upsets her.

There’s a knock at the door, and she startles.

“Hey Barbie, you short-circuit or something? Hurry it up, I gotta piss. Sent you in there to shower, not retile my bathroom,” Hank’s gruff voice calls from the hallway.

Connie realizes that she’s leaning heavily on the sink, forehead pressed hard into the broken mirror. She can feel a thread of thirium trickling down the bridge of her nose, and a single blue droplet plinks onto the faucet. She can hear herself breathing, drawing in air to aid her cooling processes.

“Barbie?” Another knock. “Connie?” 

“It’s unlocked.”

There’s a moment of silent hesitation, then the door squeals open just enough that Hank can poke her face around the frame. “Jesus, Connie.” She immediately pulls her head back and the door snaps shut again. “You could’ve just told me not to come in yet.”

Connie’s fingers are gripping the sides of the sink hard enough to crack the enamel finish. “It’s okay,” she says. “You can come in.” She watches another drop of blue fall from the tip of her nose. All her joints seem to have locked up, though the halfhearted diagnostic scan she runs come back normal. She licks her lips unnecessarily and tries again: “Can you come in?”

The door opens again, slower this time but all the way. Hank stands in the doorway, hands stuffed deep into her pockets. Connie stares at her in the mirror. Even without her big boots, she’s still so tall, so imposing. Connie’s chest seizes with the memory of a strong hand pushing her irresistibly into the mirror. “Everything okay in here, Barbie?” Hank says, apparently making an admirable effort to soften the whiskey-growl of her voice.

“Yes,” Connie says brightly, then a second later, “No.”

Hank takes one hesitant step forward, quiet on the tile in thick tube socks. She pulls one hand out of her pocket, scrubs her palm across the front of her shirt, then stuffs it back into her pocket. “What’s up?” she asks. “Any particular reason you’re headbutting my mirror? Something… malfunctioning? I don’t know anything about androids, sorry.” 

“Oh. No, I’m. Everything is. It’s.” Connie pries one of her hands from the sink so she can wave her arm around in an attempt to convey whatever it is that her vocal processor isn’t translating from the demented binary omelet her multi-million dollar consciousness has produced. She feels unbalanced without both hands on the sink, though, so she puts it back.

Hank’s eyes do a sweep of the room, catching on the scattered remains of Connie’s clothes, and she gives a disbelieving snort. “You mutate into the Incredible Hulk while you were in here or something?”

A split-second search enables Connie to comprehend the reference. She grins into the mirror, and her teeth glitter in hundreds of crazy refractions. “Sort of the opposite, I think,” she says, chuckling humorlessly. “I feel like I got a lot smaller and suddenly have a lot more accountability.”

“Yeah, guess I can see where that’d be a bitch.”

Connie releases a shaky sigh. Her breath doesn’t mist the glass. “Hank, I’m naked,” she says.

“No shit,” says Hank.

There’s an enormity of bright, sharp things trapped somewhere between Connie’s voice box and her teeth. All she manages to say is, “I think I’d like to sit down.”

Hank’s hands come out of her pockets, and Connie is glad to see them. She holds them palm-out like Connie is a suspect she’s trying to talk down. “Alright, let’s go sit down,” she says, and it’s low enough to be a purr. Connie thinks she could count every wire inside of herself. Hank takes another step forward, bolder. “Can I give you a hand? Is it okay if I touch you?”

“Yes,” Connie says, too quickly, and is careful to rein in the _please_ that fights to follow.

Hank picks up the towel folded on the toilet lid and shakes it out. She approaches so slowly, and settles the towel around Connie’s shoulders. “Alright. Alright,” she says, and she keeps saying it. Alright, alright, alright. Connie nods with every _alright_ , maybe agreeing. Yes, she would like it to be alright. Yes, the old coffee on Hank’s breath is alright. Yes, the feeling of Hank’s big hands around Connie’s thin fingers is alright.

Gently, so gently, Hank works Connie’s rigid hands free of the sink. Immediately, Connie seizes Hank’s fingers in both fists, holding tight, but stopping just short of causing real damage.

Hank clears her throat. “Uh, Barbie. Real sweet that you wanna hold hands but you’re gonna have to let go for a sec. Just until we get you to the couch, how about that?" 

Connie considers this. Hank’s fingers are hot and slick with sweat. They’re perfect in Connie’s hands. “No,” she decides. She can’t help but hold on just a little tighter.

“Okay, uh. Well. Jesus. Okay. Here.” Hank fumbles for the corners of the towel and uses her free thumbs to hold it around Connie as best she can. “Come on then, if you’re gonna be such a fucking princess about it.” But the words are still soothing. With her hands trapped awkwardly against Connie’s collarbones, she gently propels her toward the bathroom door. Slowly, haltingly, they march down the hallway and into the living room. (“Conga!” Hank huffs, sounding caught between amusement and panic.) 

Connie feels every pound of her not inconsiderable weight as they go, but somehow they make it to the couch. “Judo!” Hank gives a sharp whistle through her teeth to the massive St. Bernard sprawled across the cushions. “Off. Mama needs the couch for a bit. Go to your bed. Go lay down.” With one mournful _boof,_ Judo heaves herself to the floor and slouches off to the kitchen.

Connie supposes she should let go now and sit down. Her hands refuse to relinquish their hold on Hank’s. Hank seems to understand this without asking. “Alright,” she says again. “Alright. Come on.” She turns both of them around and sits herself down on the couch, catching Connie at the hipbones to pull her down too. Connie tries to go slowly, carefully, but Hank still groans under her weight.

“Sorry,” Connie whispers. Hank’s thighs flatten and spread against the couch cushions and Connie fits there so comfortably.

"It’s alright, just surprised, is all,” Hank grunts. “So what’s up, Barbie? What’s the latest crisis?”

Connie adjusts her hold on one of Hank’s hands so she can rub the pad of her thumb in circles on Hank’s thumbnail. Something in the repetitive motion soothes the spasmodic juddering of her components. She does not know how to begin describing the terrible realness of everything to Hank, does not know if she even wants to. So instead she says, “I like your hands, Hank. They’re very nice.”

Somewhere near Connie’s auditory component, Hank emits a peculiar bitten-off choking noise. Her temperature rises against Connie’s skin, barely covered by the old towel. “Uh. Thanks, I guess?” Hank says, sounding a little strangled. “That’s not what you’re having a crisis about, is it?”

Connie could take the time to try and explain, lay out every new anxiety that has manifested in the short time since she claimed ownership of her own consciousness. But the idea exhausts her already-taxed processors, and Hank’s hands are so hot and big and solid in her own, and the way Hank’s pulse has ratcheted up almost imperceptibly is so much more interesting. It is so much easier just to bring one of Hank’s index fingers up to her mouth and flick her tongue out to taste.

Her sensors say: ANDERSON, HENRIETTA. Her sensors say: coffee, graphite, canine dander (St. Bernard), whiskey (Black Lamb), sweat, gunshot residue, canola oil, antibacterial soap.

Something else inside her sings: Hank, Hank, Hank, Hank. She wants to sing along, so she does. “Hank,” she hums. “Hank. Hank.” She can feel all of the esoteric moving things inside her harmonizing, every tendon and wire of her plucked like a harp to resonate with Hank, Hank, Hank. 

“What…” Hank rasps, but she doesn’t pull her hand away. She seems to have stopped breathing entirely.

“I like your hands,” Connie says again, and closes her lips entirely around Hank’s fingertip.

She sucks gently to draw Hank’s finger in to the second knuckle, and Hank offers no resistance. Connie closes her eyes and savors everything: the rasp of calluses, the smooth half-moon of the nail, the satisfying girth, the weight on her tongue. At her back, the soft press of Hank’s belly and breasts grounds her, and Hank’s breath is growing ragged against the side of her throat.

Everything is so much softer, so much further away and so much closer, and when Hank slowly pushes her finger deeper into Connie’s mouth and presses against the flat of her tongue, it’s all so good. _Beautiful_ , Connie thinks, and hollows her cheeks. 

“Can’t believe I…” Hank pauses and swallows thickly. “Can’t believe I’m letting you come onto me fifteen seconds after you had some kind of breakdown in my bathroom. Am I supposed to be the responsible party here? Ow!” It was hardly more than a nip, but a sudden impact on the meat of her thigh tells Connie that Hank has freed her other hand and delivered a sharp reprimand—although Connie’s synthetic nerves register the impact as little more than pressure.

Connie lets Hank’s finger slip from her mouth just long enough to say, “If you’re the responsible party, then take responsibility.” And then her mouth is full again, two of Hank’s strong fingers pushing their way far past her teeth, pressing against the back of her tongue. Connie’s sensors are spasming, blazing like solar flares, spitting out nonsensical snatches of data in brilliant bursts that are almost too much for her to bear. Then Hank is pulling her fingers back out, blunt nails dragging sweetly along the roof of Connie’s mouth as they go. A whine escapes Connie’s throat and chases Hank’s fingers as they slip from her lips. 

“So you like my hands, do you?” Hank hums against her ear, letting her slick fingers play cruelly along Connie’s bottom lip. “That a recent development, or…?”

“No, not recent,” Connie murmurs, voice more a buzz than anything. She flickers her tongue out, hoping to catch a taste, but Hank’s fingertips dance back out of reach.

“ _Just_ my hands? I could commission a cast of them for you, if that’s all you really want.” 

“No!” Connie is almost surprised by the vehemence in her own voice, the mechanical whine clearly audible under the word. “No,” she tries again, as levelly as she can manage. “They’re you. Distilled. Something small enough to hold.” She can feel herself growing frustrated, flustered and hot, unable to articulate what she wants to say.

But Hank just chuckles, sounding a little breathless, and presses her fingers back into Connie’s grateful mouth. “Relax, Barbie,” she purrs into the hinge of Connie’s jaw. “I’m just being an asshole.”

Connie, already lost again in the pretty mess Hank’s fingertips make of her sensors, fumbles at her side for Hank’s other hand. Hank seems to take pity on her and runs her hand up Connie’s side, resting a palm flat over her thirium pump regulator. She slowly drags her thumbnail along the seam of the pump where it shows through Connie’s skin, and Connie buzzes low, squirming. 

It would be so easy to say that this is a different Hank from the woman Connie scraped up off the kitchen floor only days before, a wounded animal that snarled and reeked of slow death. But no, Connie thinks, sighing into the slide of Hank’s fingers against her tongue. No, this is a glimpse of the woman behind the wreck, something towering and grand, startling in its brilliance. These are still beautiful hands. There is something that might yet be nurtured here, a small fire to feed.

“Show me what I can do for you,” Hank murmurs. “Help me understand.” Her thumbnail catches at the edge of the thirium pump, and Connie shivers.

Connie tries to say _Like this,_ but she fumbles the words out around Hank’s fingers and they come out garbled nonsense, chased by a string of drool. Instead, she nudges Hank’s hand to the side and slots her own fingernails into the seam of the pump, then gives a sharp tug.

Warnings flash red and angry in her visual interface, and she flicks them aside impatiently. She hasn’t pulled the pump out that far, only an inch or so, not nearly enough to cut any crucial connections. Her fingers are slippery with her own blue blood, and she feels Hank tense behind her. She takes Hank’s hand and reassuringly strokes her fingers before setting them against the exposed pump.

“Alright, I got you, Barbie. I got you. Go ahead and bite me if I do something you don’t like, okay? Or, I don’t know, if you’re gonna pass out from blood loss or something.”

Connie barely has time for a frantic nod before Hank skims one of her wonderful fingers along the inner ridge of the pump, and every circuit, every artificial nerve flares with _so much_. Connie’s hands scramble for purchase and she ends up clutching Hank’s sleeves. Her head falls back onto Hank’s shoulder and Hank’s fingers follow, stroking a relentless rhythm along Connie’s tongue that makes her pant wetly, desperate to draw in enough air to cool her straining biocomponents. She can hear herself making noises, some with her voice and others the product of whirring and whining components that were never built to withstand anything like _this_.

Somewhere beneath the roar of thirium in her ears, Connie can hear Hank murmuring in her beautifully ruined voice, the Black Lamb gravel of it scraping low in her chest and buzzing in time with Connie’s insides. Things like _I’ve got you,_ and _pretty little thing,_ and _is that good? Is that good?_ With the entire flawed machinery of herself, Connie screams and sings _YES._

All at once, a clean boneless nothingness numbs Connie’s limbs, and she melts into Hank’s lap. The fingers in her mouth pet her tongue one last time before withdrawing. There are little noises escaping her still, quiet trills and hitches, but nothing so frantic as before. She brings one sluggish hand up to help Hank push the thirium pump back into place. 

“Well, that’s a new one for me, gotta say,” Hank says after a long liquid moment, out of breath and halfway laughing.

Connie tries to ask, _Now what can I do for you?_ but it comes out a confused slurry of vowels. Hank just chuckles deep in her chest, and folds Connie up in her big arms, condensing her into something real again. She presses her lips to the corner of Connie’s mouth, the only place she can reach from her awkward position. 

They sit there like that for a long time, Connie knows factually, but it seems terribly short. She catalogues every millisecond until she starts to feel Hank growing colder by inches, the slump returning to her frame and the stiffness returning to the hands that had been so soft and nimble only moments before. It’s alright, Connie decides, gripping Hank’s sleeves tightly. She will chase those thaws and coax them out until they last longer each time, tend all those tiny fires that can still be found in so many little corners of this woman.

“I like you, Hank,” she says, packing everything she can into three bland words. She will find better ones later, once she has had time to weigh them in her hands and on her tongue.

Hank’s arms tighten around her, just for a second. “Jesus Christ alone knows why,” she scoffs. Then, quieter, “Yeah, I like you too, Barbie. If that wasn’t totally clear.” 

For a while, they just stay there in comfortable sticky silence, until Hank clears her throat again, a sure sign she is about to ask something she perceives to be awkward. “And uh, let me know if you don’t like me calling you that. Barbie, I mean. It was a joke at first, but. Yanno. Things stick.”

“No, I like the way you say it,” Connie hums thoughtfully. “Although, I think if anyone else were to call me that, I might maim them a little.” 

“Wouldn’t blame you if you did.”

“But you can call me that. Without penalty of maiming, I promise.”

“Very cute, thanks.” Hank is quiet for a moment more before coughing again. “I don’t suppose you’d consider maybe letting me up. Maybe just putting your head in my lap or something. Or literally anything else. I think you’re about to rupture my spleen.”

Connie thinks it over. “No,” she decides.

“Oh. Okay, this is just my life now. Some kind of kinky human chair.”

“Yes. It is.”

“That’s fine, I didn’t need both of my lungs, I guess.”

Connie can almost hear Hank’s spine creaking under her weight. There are unopened bottles of whiskey in the cupboard, and somewhere there is still one bullet loaded in the chamber of a revolver. There is a photo lying face-down in its frame on the kitchen table. Outside, snow is piling up and the streets are choked with evacuation order stillness.

But here, at least, in this house, there is a woman whose hands are large and warm, and Connie knows what fits in the spaces between those fingers.

**Author's Note:**

> author is a flaming homosexual and regrets nothing.  
> @flamingo_tooth/everyoneissquidwardinpurgatory dot tumblr dot com


End file.
